Session: Follow the evidence – but where does it lead?

Martin Knapp
Professor of Social Policy and Director of the Personal Social Services Research Unit
London School of Economics and Political Science

Martin Knapp is Professor of Health and Social Care Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), based in the Health Policy Department. He is also a Professorial Research Fellow in the Care Policy and Evaluation Centre, LSE. Since 2009, Martin has been Director of the School for Social Care Research, part of the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR). His main research areas are social care, child and adult mental health, dementia and autism, with much of his work using economic arguments and evidence to inform policy discussion and influence practice development.

Session: The post-Brexit world

Nick Crabb
Programme Director – Scientific Affairs
NICE

Nick had a 20 year career in analytical science, process technology and general management in the chemical, pharmaceutical and contract laboratory industries prior to joining NICE as the associate director for the Diagnostics Assessment Programme in 2010. Nick was responsible for the establishment and management of the programme. In 2014 Nick was appointed Programme Director for Scientific Affairs where he oversees NICE Scientific Advice, the Science Policy and Research programme and the NICE Office for Market Access.

Session: Over-diagnosis: intervening too soon and too much?

Professor Anthony Wierzbicki
Chair, Guideline Committee on Hypertension, NICE
Consultant in Metabolic Medicine and Chemical Pathology, Guy's & St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust

Session: Bringing innovation to genomic medicine  

Dr Angela George
Diagnostics Advisory Committee specialist committee member for Lynch syndrome guidance, NICE
Consultant in Oncogenetics,  Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust 

Session chair

Richard Vize
Director
Public Policy Media Ltd

Richard Vize (@RichardVize) has been a commentator on public policy and public services reform for over 25 years. He is a columnist for the Guardian Healthcare Network, contributes to the British Medical Journal and works with a range of organisations across health and local government.

Richard is a former editor of both Health Service Journal and Local Government Chronicle, and was head of communications at regulator Ofsted. He and his teams have won a number of awards.

He is a trustee of the whistleblowing charity Public Concern at Work. Richard’s passions are photography, independent travel and political history.

Session: NICE technologies guidance – future-proofing our methods

Helen Knight
Programme Director, Centre for Health Technology Evaluation
NICE 

Session: The science and art of quality improvement 

Professor Mary Dixon-Woods
Director
The Healthcare Improvement Studies (THIS) Institute

Mary Dixon-Woods FAcSS FMedSci is Director of THIS Institute and The Health Foundation Professor of Healthcare Improvement Studies at the University of Cambridge and Co-Editor-in-Chief of BMJ Quality and Safety. She is a Professorial Fellow at Homerton College, Cambridge, an NIHR Senior Investigator, and Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of General Practitioners.  She served on the National Advisory Group on the Safety of Patients in England in 2013 and the review of information technology in the NHS led by Professor Bob Wachter, which reported in 2016. Mary was the Harveian Orator for the Royal College of Physicians in 2018.

Session: Accelerated Access Collaborative – the big picture

Dr Paul Catchpole
Value and Access Director
Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry 

Paul has worked in the healthcare, local government and pharmaceutical sectors for over 30 years. He began his career as an NHS researcher and then held a number of NHS management posts before working on a wide range of UK and international management consultancy assignments at PriceWaterhouseCoopers.  After moving to Roche, he led work on national reimbursement of medicines, health economics, strategic pricing and market access. 

Paul’s policy work at the ABPI over the last 10 years includes all aspects of medicines evaluation, health technology assessment, pricing and reimbursement, market access, the Cancer Drugs Fund, biosimilar medicines, EAMS and the Accelerated Access Collaborative.  He has led work on shaping and evolving value, access and uptake policy for the pharmaceutical industry in the UK for the last four PPRS negotiations, including the current Voluntary Scheme for Branded Medicines Pricing and Access.

He has a Ph.D in healthcare information systems and is a Member of the British Computer Society and a Chartered Information Technology Professional.

Session: Intelligent Machines – harnessing the power of algorithms

Dr Sebastian Vollmer
Programme Co-Director for Health
Alan Turing Institute

Session: Getting the right data

Jeanette Kusel
Director, Scientific Advice
NICE 

Jeanette joined NICE as Director for Scientific Advice in November 2018. She is responsible for the stewardship and growth of the NICE Scientific Advice business unit, which includes all aspects of business development, management, project delivery and governance. Jeanette takes an active role in the sign-off and quality assurance of work across all services offered by the team. She also chairs many of the national and parallel scientific advice meetings for medical device and pharmaceutical product developers.

Previously Jeanette held the positions of Head of HTA and Health Economics and Scientific Director at Costello Medical, a consultancy within the life science sector. She has broad research interests across different methods for health technology evaluation and has previously worked on clinical trial design, health economic modelling and quality of life measurement.

Jeanette studied undergraduate natural sciences at the University of Cambridge and postgraduate health economics at the University of York.

Session: Workshop – putting guidelines at the heart of integrated care

Deborah O'Callaghan
Associate Director (Midlands and East)
Public Health Sector Lead
NICE

Deborah O’Callaghan is the Associate Director of the NICE Field Team in the Midlands and East.  She is also the Sector Lead for Public Health.  Working with health and care systems and organisations, her role is to support the use NICE guidance and Quality Standards to achieve high quality care and improvements in health and wellbeing.  Deborah is committed to collaborating with partner organisations including other national bodies to ensure a cohesive package of support is available to organisations across the region.

Deborah has worked at NICE for 10 years, prior to which she held a variety of strategy, redesign and quality improvement roles within the NHS and social care sector.  More recent posts include Associate Director of Strategic Development in a London PCT and Director of a London Cardiac Network.

Session: Getting the right data

Matt Sydes
Professor of Clinical Trials & Methodology
University College London

Matt is responsible for leading the unit's Trial Conduct Methodology activities as well as teams conducting research in prostate cancer and osteosarcoma. Matt has a particular interest in improving clinical trial conduct, particularly around: the use of routinely-collected electronic health records (EHR) to support and run trials with Health Data Research UK; running trials with a view to regulatory use and submission; proportionate and efficient trial monitoring; clinical trial data sharing; communication of trial findings; adaptive and efficient designs for late-phase trials, including in uncommon conditions; and the functioning of Data Monitoring Committees. On this, he was involved in the DAMOCLES project which set standards for (independent) Data Monitoring Committees and led to the widespread use of charters for trial committees. He is part of the faculty for UCL's regular 1-day course on Data Monitoring Committees in practice. Matt has served as a member of IDMCs and TSCs, often as chair, for more around 50 trials, attending around 200 meetings. Matt teaches on these topics on the UCL Institute of Clinical Trials and Methodology's MSc in Clinical Trials. He is supervising a number of PhD students in these areas of methodological priority.

Session: Tackling big killers

Shahed Ahmad
National Clinical Director for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention
NHS England

Session: Follow the evidence – but where does it lead?

Ben Goldacre
Senior Clinical Research Fellow, Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Services
University of  Oxford

Ben Goldacre is a doctor, researcher and author. His books including "Bad Science" have sold over 700,000 copies in 30 countries. He runs the DataLab at the University of Oxford, building tools and services from large health datasets, and advises government on better uses of data and technology. He leads various technology projects including OpenPrescribing.net, an open data explorer for NHS primary care prescribing with over 130,000 users a year; and TrialsTracker.net, an open tool that monitors clinical trial reporting performance.
https://www.phc.ox.ac.uk/team/ben-goldacre

Session: Accelerated Access Collaborative – the big picture

Dr Sam Roberts
Chief Executive
Accelerated Access Collaborative

Samantha Roberts has recently been appointed as Chief Executive of the Accelerated Access Collaborative, the national umbrella organisation for health innovation, hosted in NHS England and NHS Improvement. 

She originally trained as a doctor and practiced medicine in South Africa, the UK, and Australia before undertaking an MBA and joining McKinsey and Company,  where she worked in a wide range of industries before specialising in healthcare.

After McKinsey she moved into the NHS as a senior manager at a large teaching hospital in London (UCLH) and a director in an Academic Health Sciences Centre and Network (UCLPartners). Before taking on the role of Director of Innovation, Research and Life Sciences at NHS England and NHS Improvement last year. 

Over the last five years she has become involved in research, working with health economic models to inform evidence-based policy, initially at the London School of Economics before moving to the University of Oxford to undertake a DPhil (PhD).